Kenneth De Courcy
Kenneth de Courcy buffs will be pleased to know that they can now visit a website with some interesting further information about this maverick figure. The site can be found at < http:// www.pharo.com/intelligence >, and is run by the team which produced Double Standards, last year’s interesting study of the Hess affair. Some of the material will be familiar to Lobster readers from articles by myself and John Burnes in recent editions and there is no need to recycle it here. The most interesting new development concerns de Courcy’s connection with the Swedes. This revolved around the diplomat Bjorn Prytz, who was the intermediary between Britain and Germany in the abortive peace feeler put out by Foreign Secretary Halifax and his number two, Butler, in June 1940. De Courcy, who had persuaded Butler of the need to explore some kind of armistice with Germany, knew Prytz, probably as a result of his activities on behalf of Stewart Menzies, Chief of SIS.
As is well known the talks were stopped by Churchill who threatened to lock up both Halifax and Butler. De Courcy himself had to lie low and found himself under suspicion again when the Hess affair blew up in May of the following year. These two events undermined de Courcy’s previous good standing in the British establishment and he was thereafter somewhat on the fringes – except that he continued to publish his Intelligence Digest which from time to time contained detailed information on the progress of the war. It is now revealed that de Courcy was able to do this because ‘we have the Swedish secret service reports…. Only Prytz and I know. HMG cannot make out how I know what is going on behind enemy lines.’
Despite his problems de Courcy stayed in touch with Menzies during the war. The implication must be that he was a conduit into the Swedish establishment for Menzies and possibly for underground dealings with Germans willing to discuss peace such as Admiral Canaris, the Abwehr chief, Hermann Goering (whose chauffeur was a Swedish agent), the SS intelligence boss Walter Schellenberg or, at the end of the war, Heinrich Himmler. (De Courcy told me that he had met Himmler and thought him a man with no scruples but someone you could do business with: I assumed and still do that he was referring to prewar days). There remains one question. During and after the war de Courcy became convinced that there were a large number of Soviet ‘moles’ in the British establishment (including Roger Hollis) and that the chief recruiter for them had been Victor Rothschild. Where did he get this idea? Was it a result of anti-Communist paranoia, as most thought at the time, or did the Swedes have something?
A Good Companion?
The recently published Oxford Companion to World War Two (Oxford, 2001) has been well received and in general it is a scholarly and full piece of work. But it contains at least two misleading entries. These relate to Rudolf Hess and Kim Philby.
Lobster readers will need no introduction to the controversy about Rudolf Hess, which has frequently surfaced in its pages over the years. The author of the entry on Hess rehashes the old lone-pilot-on-a-crazy-mission story, dismissing all the work of Hugh Thomas (and others such as Peter Padfield) who have unearthed enough material to explode that old chestnut. It bluntly states that the double theory has been ‘disproved’. But by whom and when? We are not told, unsurprisingly, since nobody has actually been able to disprove it and in fact the latest work on the subject provides plenty of material to confirm the Thomas theory in general despite changing some of the details.(1) It might have been better for the editors of the Oxford volume to have had a look at the Macmillan Dictionary of the Second World War, published in 1995, where the Hess double theory is taken seriously.
As far as Philby is concerned the entry, by Robert Cecil, who worked with SIS in the 1940s, is short and uncontroversial until the end, when it states that his autobiography, My Silent War (1968) ‘contains much disinformation’, and fingers for special criticism Philby’s ‘untrue’ claim that the Foreign Office and SIS ‘began, as early as 1943’ to divert efforts from defeating the Nazis to menacing Stalin – and his ‘greatly exaggerated’ version of wartime rivalry between SIS and MI5.
The first of these claims is just wrong. What Philby actually says is that between the wars SIS was devoted mainly to the defence of Britain against Bolshevism and that service thinking ‘reverted to its old and congenial channels’ when ‘the defeat of the Axis was in sight’. He also points out that the steps that were taken, namely the creation of Section IX, were ‘modest’. The outfit was ‘small’ and devoted to a study of past anti-Communist activity. It was Philby himself who encouraged the Foreign Office and SIS to expand the remit of this new Section when he took it over, as he admits in chapters six and seven of the memoirs. He points out that the staffing and equipment of the Section was a struggle ‘with peacetime economies already in sight’, that ‘very few officers in the service at that time knew anything about Communism’, that there was hardly any secret intelligence to work on and most of what there was was ‘fake’.(2) None of this supports Cecil’s point: indeed it all contradicts what he writes in the Oxford Companion.
When it comes to rivalry between MI5 and SIS Philby describes tensions but it is hardly a lurid picture. The two services did not have an easy relationship, although there were important areas where co-operation worked well. The frictions between them were well known; Phillip Knightley mentions the ‘traditional enmity’ between them being sharpened by MI5’s success in monitoring pro-Axis activity in Britain and the Empire after 1940 and refers to the obstructionism SIS had to overcome in Whitehall.(3)
Why does the Oxford volume peddle these inaccuracies? Perhaps it is just a question of intellectual laziness on the part of the writers. Whatever the reason the effect of these articles is to support two myths. The first is a version of the Hess affair that does not draw attention to the extent of the contacts between Germany and limited but important circles within British society before and during World War Two. The second is the comfortable picture of Philby that he was an old-fashioned, arrogant, public school cad and liar who betrayed everyone and everything for the sake of Stalin Yet this is nonsense. Philby was one of many young men and women who reacted with anger and bewilderment to the poverty of millions during the slump and to the willingness of successive British governments to take no action as the Nazis transformed Germany into the greatest threat to peace and civilisation the world had ever seen. In the meantime only the USSR seemed willing to stand up to Fascism, and for a time during the war, to do any serious fighting. Few of the generation to which Philby belonged had the chance to work at the heart of British intelligence (or of the civil service machine). But as one very loyal old writer with limited experience as an SIS agent said to me years ago, how many, in those dark days, would have refused, to have sent helpful information to Moscow ‘for the price of a postage stamp’ if they had had a chance to do so? These are not comfortable truths for the British establishment and it is a pity that the Oxford volume does not have the guts to state them.
Notes
1 See Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince and Stephen Prior, Double Standards: the Rudolf Hess cover-up (London and New York: Time Warner paperbacks, 2002).
2 Kim Philby, My Silent War (London: Grafton books, 1989 edition, pp. 154, 159).
3 Phillip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession (London: Pan books, 1986), p. 117.